


Laughter

by ShadowoftheLamp



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Blood, Canon - Manga, M/M, Post-Canon, Ship Week
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-15
Updated: 2020-07-15
Packaged: 2021-03-05 03:42:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,207
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25257898
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShadowoftheLamp/pseuds/ShadowoftheLamp
Summary: Ryou can't seem to forget. Neither can the Spirit.
Relationships: Bakura Ryou/Yami Bakura
Comments: 4
Kudos: 14
Collections: Tendershipping Week 2020





	Laughter

**Author's Note:**

> Tendershipping Week Day 4: Thief.

There was nothing.

Well, not _nothing_ , but darkness wasn't much of anything. Funny, for all he'd cackled about how he'd mastered it, it was different when it was smothering, a weight on his arms and legs and head and soul.

Ryou couldn't stand the lights on one minute and then hated having them off the next. The shadows bled from the way the light reflected off the couch, how it seemed to devour the wall behind it, and he swore he could still hear the voice in his mind. (Was that himself? Had he started thinking of himself as a separate voice? It had been ages since he'd _really_ been alone, even though anyone outside him would have wondered about the boy who talked to his reflection like it was an old friend.)

He wished he could talk to Ryou. Ryou who had seemed so pliable as a child but had proved entertaining, a match for the fire, (heh, fire, even though it wasn't that funny, in fact, it wasn't funny at all, but what did he have but jokes? it wasn't like he could cry anymore) who carved out rules for use of the body with gritted teeth and tugged at the rope of the Ring so hard it had chafed his neck. He'd respected him. From a soft child, he'd hardened and grown firm, grown powerful, grown to be worthy. What were the odds fate had given him a chance at the same time someone had handed a young Yugi the box with the Puzzle? A roll of the dice. (The Gods having a last laugh, perhaps..)

Ryou dug his nails into the wood of the desk so hard that it made crescents, tiny moons in the umber that dug splinters into his pale fingers. The little model of the Thief King sat, as he always did, half-hidden on his shelf behind the pieces of Zorc. He'd never bothered to glue the monster back together but felt oddly reluctant to just incinerate the figures and be done with them. Both of them. Either of them. Maybe he just didn't want to pretend it had never happened. (Maybe he was worried he'd forget, thoughts and memories swept away by the sands of time, trickling down the hourglass, minute by minute, day by day, as he aged the way the Spirit had never been allowed to.)

Nothing bothered him besides the pressure. Perhaps the shadows had been wiped clean and he was alone for the first time in however many millennia. More likely being completely alone was his own personal torture, like being dumped with hot water after freezing in a storm. So many years with Zorc and the spirits of the lost cooing and howling in his ears made the loneliness pluck at his soul like a violin played with a knife.

Ryou graduated high school. He got a comfortable job at the museum, but every day he passed the Egyptian exhibit, his hand went to his chest, where the fabric of his simple button shirt was too light. Naked. His back ached from burying his face in books, in scriptures in languages he was only just learning but knew like the back of his hand if he looked at _just_ the right angle. Strange, as he'd always figured that the thief was probably illiterate. Perhaps it had come from another spirit within the Ring, or Malik when he'd rummaged around in his brain. 

He tried to swirl the shadows into figures in the moments he could move. Into models. It never managed to stay anything other than clouds for long, and he couldn't see very well anyway.

The books gathered dust as Ryou focused on the scrolls, their mysteries unfolding as he took a step towards the past, towards an answer, towards correction for the boy he had lost everything to a demon but his use and the lingering threads of self tied to a river of blood.

He buried his head (did he still have a head? did he have a body? did he still exist, outside of thought?) in his knees (did he have knees? did he still have a body...?) and tried very hard to not think, which is a thought in itself and rather defeats the purpose, but at least it was better than the blinding white of a Ka that came otherwise, or the soft feeling of hair beneath his fingers as Ryou laughed in their brain at a terrible joke he had made, in the rare moment they'd been able to simply exist together. Ryou came often- the Pharaoh was fuzzy as a mirage now, but Ryou had been real. They'd almost made it work, in the times when he'd been lying in wait, in the times he had wanted to keep Ryou happy to keep his 'rental' but hadn't realized what the flutter in his spirit had been. (How even now the idea of Ryou smiling made the nothingness, if not home, more and less bearable at the same time because it had been but was no more.)

Ryou told no one. Yugi... he might understand, but it was too risky. Everyone else would think him mad. Maybe he was. (Probably he was.) He rubbed bags from under his eyes the size and weight of a tomb robber's sacks of gold, and he wrote, and he planned, and he waited.

He wished he could hear that laugh again, with its slight edge of ice-fire, curled paper-flame that knew ash, knew loss, knew him as well as anyone could when he'd been made of walls of solid gold and white-hot loathing. That laugh that was joyous anyway, that promised something better.

The moon shone bright, and Ryou sat in his kitchen, with handmade clay and chalk smearing the tile (he would use the living room, it was bigger, but the carpet would warp the symbols and he couldn't get this wrong, he just _couldn't_ ) before slicing the back of his hand (on the knotted scar the spirit had made the day they'd formally met, the day he'd tried to kill his new friends but had proven capable of being defeated, capable of being human) and turning it over, blood trickling drop by drop until it splashed, fractions of it bursting upwards again, disappearing when the circle lit. Blood for blood. Scar for scar.

He exploded to life, exposed and confused and looking around for answers, for reason, for punishment. But there was only Ryou, only Ryou's face that split into a grin that was all teeth and only Ryou that pulled him into a hug that ached his new body. (It was a good ache. He'd say later it was the best ache he'd ever felt.) Ryou laughed as he buried his face in the skin still warm from rebirth. (The laugh was better than he had remembered, even with an edge of hysteria and fingernails smeared with clay dug into his skin, and he laughed along, fresh air in lungs that were his for the first time in so many years.)

Ryou had picked up a bit of thieving after all, snatching life from the jaws of eternal death, and he laughed and he laughed and he laughed.

**Author's Note:**

> This also kinda counts for Day 7: Reunion, but I couldn't really say that at the start without spoiling. (Not that it wasn't probably obvious where it was going.)
> 
> Comments and kudos super appreciated!


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